Do your customers, staff and partners view your brand the way you want them to? Is your brand living up to its promises? There’s a surprisingly quick and easy way to pull a general brand metric and reveal critical alignment issues that could be hurting your brand.

Brands spend millions of dollars every year to measure their alignment (i.e., does our brand really stand for what we think it does with stakeholders?). And while rigorous research is certainly in order on a periodic basis, it usually costs a ton and takes a long time.
There is an alternative to the time and expense of formal brand alignment research: a simple survey and analysis approach you can actually do by yourself in a day or two.
Ask 10 to 20 people (the more the merrier) holding diverse positions within your company (from executives to the stockroom) the following question: “In five words or less, what does our brand stand for; what are we about?” Whether it’s a company or product brand you’re measuring, hold on to your socks. You may be shocked at the misaligned perceptions.

You can do the “asking” with a web survey tool or simply walk the halls with a clipboard. Note the most commonly used key words or phrases in their answers. Count how many times they were used among all the answers.

Next, ask five of your best customers (or users) the same question: “In five words or less, what does our brand stand for, what are we all about?” Again, note how many times the same key words or phrases appear in the answers your customers provided?

Now tie this data to your brand. Does your company have a tag line? Does the key word or phrase identified in your surveys appear in your company tag line? Does the tag line accompany your logo in all uses? If you don’t have a tag line, does the most popular survey keyword or phrase appear in the top line messaging for your organization…consistently on every marketing communication? If not, your brand is misaligned with your stakeholders perceptions.

While this may not be the most scientific of survey techniques, it can help you form a hypothesis about what action to take. Maybe additional research, a formal brand alignment initiative, or it can simply provide the impetus to get your message straight using Message Mapping or other alignment techniques.